The Lost Virtues of Community
A Sermon by Rev. John E. Gibbons

It is an odd experience to read about the ordinary experiences of one's growing up as a text in cultural history, but such was my experience in reading a new book titled The Lost City by journalist Alan Ehrenhalt. He compares three Chicago-area communities as they were in the 1950's and as they are today: an urban Catholic parish called St. Nicholas of Tolentine, a black ghetto called Bronzeville, and the suburban city of Elmhurst - where in 1957 for $20,000 cash-money my parents built a home in what had been a farmer's field. That's where I grew up, and where my parents at age 85 still live.

I read about -

Soukup's hardware that 40 years ago ran a promotion on barbecue grills with free steaks from Otto's meat market...

and the coffee klatches where suburban mothers gathered and the coffeepot bubbled all day long;

and there was the PTA which met both afternoon and night (afternoon for fashion shows and teas, and night for business); and there were lawn parties at night where the manhattans and martinis flowed freely and a conga-line would occasionally break forth...

and I read how men would drive to work in Chicago, as my father did, up Roosevelt Road or Washington Avenue, because the expressways had not yet been built...

and there in this book's pages was my high school principal, Bruce Allingham, who handed out lengths of rope to boys who didn't wear belts to school...and had girls kneel to see if their skirts were too short...

and this cultural history duly observed the York High School's Courtesy Club, which sponsored Courtesy Week when students pointed out to other students that "tripping students in the hall and pushing girls' faces into drinking fountains are unsafe practices."

And then I read about that incident in the mid-50's where a concert by a young people's chorus group from Bronzeville had to be canceled because none of the suburban motels would accept black guests...

and I was surprised to read about my parents' friends Millie and Ray Smith. The extroverted intellectual Millie started the Great Books Club, and Ray - though an introvert - became the Cub Scout master, not because he particularly wanted to but because that was the sort of thing dads did...

and everybody in Elmhurst joined all kinds of clubs but the one organization that "stood above all others as a symbol of fellowship and civic pride (was) the Jaycees, the United States Junior Chamber of Commerce, the nerve center of the new suburban generation."

(Listen to this...) In the mid-50's "it was the Jaycees who revived the moribund Elmhurst Fourth of July celebration, with a parade, a fireworks display, a freedom flame pageant, and an Iwo Jima tableau. They held a soapbox derby, and bused children from school to the circus on a Friday afternoon each spring. In December the Jaycees launched a 'put Christ back in Christmas" campaign, crusading against the "Xmas" vulgarization and the creeping secularization it represented. In the winter...there were 'Put Christ Back into Christmas" stickers and signs all over Elmhurst - on postal machines, on bushes, on every tree old for the holidays anywhere in town. Residents were encouraged to send only cards that had a religious theme, and merchants were pressured to place biblical scenes in their store windows. The Boy Scouts were enlisted to distribute 8,000 pamphlet door-to-door, explaining the significance of the crusade."

Weren't those the good old days? The book makes similar but not just nostalgic observations about life in St. Nick's Parish and in Bronzeville too.

The key personality in St. Nick's was Father Lynch who walked the street in his full-length cassock. "He was always trying to find out who was doing right and wrong," someone recalled, "but he was mostly interested in wrong."

"...He not only gave out the school report cards but shared the contents of them with other families, so that parents would know they could be held accountable.... He would tell one family about the problems of another in which the husband was drinking too much. In the summer, he walked through the parish looking for teenage parties, barging in unannounced and making sure there was no alcohol present. There was never much of a line at his confession booth, and it was composed almost entirely of girls. To the boys, he would merely ask, 'Are you sorry for your sins, lad?' Once, when a boy entered the confessional to ask where the basketballs were, Lynch left the booth and thrashed him."

"When he stood at the altar with his back to the congregation, Lynch seemed to have an extrasensory knowledge of what was going on behind him. When a parishioner tried to sneak out the door a few minutes early on Sunday...Lynch liked to wheel around and humiliate him, telling him to get back in the pew where he belonged."

Life in Bronzeville in the 50's was, of course, different. It was uncommonly dangerous, for example, for a black Chicagoan to get sick - because of the 77 hospitals in the city, only six would accept black patients at all, and five of those had quotas so that if their beds were full, you'd be turned away no matter how sick you were.

Getting a traffic ticket was also a harrowing experience. Until 1958 all tickets mentioned the race of the driver. Police maintained a "flying squad" that zeroed in on blacks driving alone (so there wouldn't be witnesses), stopped, frisked, harassed, and frequently verbally and physically abused them.

A particular indignity faced blacks who traveled or attempted a vacation. For $20 a year in 1957, a black family could join an organization called the Tourist Motor Club. "What they received in return was a list of hotels and restaurants where blacks were allowed, and a guarantee of $500 in bond money in case they were arrested." Ads asked "What would you do if you were involved in a highway accident in a hostile town? You could lose your life savings - you could be kept in jail..."

Despite all this, many blacks in Chicago today would take life as it was in Bronzeville over what has happened today. One lifelong activist says, "at this point in my life and experience, we made a mistake leaving the ghetto." Why? Because life in Bronzeville was ordered a support by a caring, supportive, and engaging safety-net of family life, churches, social clubs (there were 2000 such clubs in Chicago, for everyone from the working class to the elite). There were lots of black-owned businesses, especially insurance (like the Tourist Motor Club) and there was a security. vibrancy and fabric to neighborhood life that simply doesn't exist today.

The author Alan Ehrenhalt says, "What Bronzeville had and its graduates continue to mourn, was a sense of posterity - a feeling that, however difficult the present might be, the future was worth thinking about and planning for.... Forty years later, in a time-shortened world hooked on fax machines, microwave popcorn, and MTV, the word posterity carries far less meaning than it once did. Its gradual disappearance is one of the genuine losses of modern life. To find the concept so vibrant and well entrenched in a place as deprived as Bronzeville in the 1950's seems to mock the freer but far less anchored world that most of us inhabit today."

In all three communities, life today is lonelier, more alienating, and less connected than it was forty years ago.

There is a thesis to this book, but it is not one of nostalgia or turning back the clock. Rather, it says that if we are to understand movements in our culture that would turn back the clock - the religious right, for example, or the Christian Coalition - then we must understand three shifting values.

First is a new attitude about choice, something that we now almost-universally regard as a good thing. Second, our attitude about authority. Today, we regard authority as almost-inherently suspect. We think "nobody should have the right to tell others what to think or how to behave." And third, our attitude about sin. Once a very real and very personal thing, sin is now regarded (if it is regarded at all) as something afoot in the world, out there, socially, politically, culturally - not so much personally.

In the 50's the number of choices in almost everything was limited. Maxwell House or Folgers (not latte, mocha, or cappuccino, short, grande or skinny with a shot of hazelnut, etc., etc.). It was NBC, ABC, or CBS, not channel surfing the universe. You weren't going to meet your spouse on the Internet, and when you made your choice of spouse or vocation, people were more likely to stick with the initial choice come-what-may. "Commitment was a virtue greatly honored, even when the choices made proved less than ideal." Even factories were reluctant to move for purely financial reasons. Even a liquor company trumpeted its loyalty, "We make fine bourbon," said the manufacturers of Old Fitzgerald, "at a profit if we can. At a loss if we must. But always fine bourbon." Some of this, of course, was nonsense - but some of it was true: loyalties and commitments ran deep.

Authority figures, like Father Lynch, the priest, or Mr. Allingham, the school principal, were not always loved in the 50's but they were still presumed to have some guidance to offer. Parishioners were not on a first time basis with their clergy: it wasn't John and Jamie, not even Father Mark.

And in the 50's it was well understood that sin referred to personal wrongdoing. There were Ten Commandments, for God's sake, not ten suggestions.

What I suggest to you this morning is not that we return to the old-time religion regarding choice, or authority, or sin, but that we understand the trade-offs we make and that we begin to reinterpret these matters in ways that do make sense in our lives now. If we fail to do so, I suggest but do not command, the present conservative tide may be just a drop in the bucket. We may have seen nothing yet. We may be in for a tidal wave of reaction that will indeed bring back the 50's - but with only its horrors of narrowness, conformity and wrathful judgment, and with none of its benefits.

Here's what I suggest we consider:

Choice is not an ultimate value, any more so than for windows openness is always to be preferred to closedness. When we decide that a good grocery store must stock tomato pesto bread, arugula, and fresh monkfish we are deciding that those choices are to be preferred over the relationship with a local businessperson with a real name and a real personality who cannot humanly possibly stock a store with Godfrey Daniel everything.

Put this in the context of the church. If choice is everything, and the customer is always right, then the leaders of this church become clerks whose job it is to meet your every need, whether you're looking for an aerobics class, a place to spout your brand of politics, a mental hospital, or god-forbid a religion.

Put it in the context of your family. If choice is everything, then your gifted children will be deprived if you don't run yourself ragged providing every known form of enrichment activity from soup to nuts. And take a look at your spouse while you're at it - they're starting to look pretty shabby. You could do better. Choice is not an ultimate value.

On to authority. Most of us have problems with authority; ours is after all an anti-authoritarian religion. We take some glee in knocking the pompous off their pedestals. It was even a little endearing this week when in a genuine moment of humor, repartee and father-son bonding, my son gave me the finger (and I gave it back to him); but what is there up with we should not put? Our bumper stickers say 'question authority' but the better question is what in our lives carries legitimate authority?

Last week I attended the installation of a Unitarian Universalist minister in Weston, a Christian church, by our standards a conservative church. The minister delivering the sermon pounded the pulpit reminding us that this is not "the people's church; it is God's church!" I went away cowed and a bit disturbed (glad that I'm in Bedford, not Weston, not that they'd have me); but still I don't think anti-authoritarianism makes a whole faith. In decision-making, consensus - while often appropriate - invariably gives power to the most-extreme voice; even democracy, as Newt Gingrich has proven, enables a new majority to abruptly, even dangerously, usurp a new minority.

I, for one, would be uncomfortable simply calling First Parish either the people's church or God's church. I prefer that we regard ourselves as a church where the people are convinced that we may often be wrong, even unto the existence or the non-existence of God.

And last there is the matter of sin. Alan Ehrenhalt's contention is that we have lost the sense of sin as a personal failing whereas we are quite content to use the label of sin to judge pollution or war or injustice or some social failure. I am not anxious to reinstate the confession of sins to our liturgy (though I must tell you that I regularly have people, adults and children, who feel compelled and cleansed to tell me their misdeeds). Still I believe that it is appropriate to cultivate the importance of personal responsibility.

Someone, in reaction to the Million Man March, said that what would warm the cockles of her heart would be a March of a Million White Guys, atoning for our sins against women, minorities and our own families, and demanding justice at the same time!

Here's another twist. Last week several of us attended lectures titled "Abolishing the Laity" - ways of nurturing in a congregation everyone's identity as a minister. Now this may seem like a leap, but stay with me.... Take new-member orientations as an example. When you come to a church orientation, the usual approach is to show you, the consumer, all our fine products: our liberal theology, our distinguished history, our menu of provocative and entertaining programs...our pesto bread, arugula, and monkfish.

There's another way. Instead of orienting you to our church, what would it be like if we focused on orienting you to yourself? Helping you figure out what it is that you need to develop yourself spiritually. Your compassion, perhaps. Or your patience. Or your ability to love or trust or get angry prophetically or whatever. When you figure out what your values are, your needs, your gifts...then together we can make a plan to achieve the outcome you desire.

When people come to a church, then go away saying, "Oh, they didn't really have what I want" it's like saying they didn't stock arugula. Even if you're looking for bread and milk, perhaps the focus should be on helping you become clear on your values and gifts and needs rather than turning the church into a spiritual Super Stop and Shop.

Thinking about sin is really a way of thinking about what it is in you that misses the mark, that is underdeveloped, that is in need. That's not so bad. Let him or her that is without sin cast the first stone. Isn't that a healthier, more honest, and better thing for us to be doing than denying personal responsibility altogether? OK, call it personal responsibility if the word sin is too heavy for you, but if we do not call it something, we truly abdicate our moral authority.

I've given you enough to ponder, so I'm going to quit; but I'll end with one somewhat lengthy quotation from The Lost City. I pick it because, once or twice in the last week, I've found myself late at night with remote control in hand, surfing from Ricki Lake to Charles Perez, from Leno to Letterman. Here's what Ehrenhalt says:

Channel surfing is not exactly a metaphor for life, but it isn't a bad caricature of the larger predicaments of the 1990's. We are trying to operate without a chart - at both the most profound and the most mundane levels. Nowhere do we need a chart more than in front of the television set, but nobody has figured out how to make a decent one when there are dozens of channels and they can't all be listed on a single page, let alone grasped simultaneously by an ordinary human mind. The chaos of choice has made charting a futile-effort and has reduced television watching to an aimless sequence of fragmentary stimulations. Channel surfing can be addictive, and there are those who can do it night after night and show few signs of weariness. For most people, though, it is ultimately a depressing activity. There is too much choice, adding up in the end to dissatisfaction and insomnia.

Too many of the things we do in our lives, large and small, have come to resemble channel surfing, marked by a numbing and seemingly endless progression from one option to the next, all without the benefit of a chart, logistical or moral, because there are simply too many choices and no one to help sort them out. We have nothing to insulate ourselves against the perpetual temptation to try one more choice, rather than to live with what is on the screen in front of us.

May we not yearn for false choices or escape, but learn to live and confront what is;

May we not simply question all authority but seek authorities of integrity;

May we not seek to change the world alone but to change ourselves as well.

And may we become more of that which we have always wanted to be. Amen.

© Rev. John E. Gibbons, November 5, 1995
First Parish in Bedford
On the Common
75 The Great Road
Bedford, MA 01730
(781) 275-7994